This invention relates to reading machines which are used as part of a remedial reading program to assist individuals with learning disabilities or severe visual impairments or blindness.
Reading machines have been used to improve the educational attainment of individuals with learning disabilities. They have also been used by persons having visual impairment or blindness. Reading machines often include a personal computer having specialized software that provides a reading machine function to the computer. In addition, the reading machines include other PC type components such as a monitor, an audio system, a disk or mass storage device, and a keyboard. In general, reading machines for blind persons may not include a monitor and pointing device, whereas those for individuals with learning disabilities will include a monitor and printing device. In general, specialized software processes an input source document and generates synthetic speech to enable a user to hear the computer read through the document a word, line, sentence etc. at a time. Often these reading machines include a scanner to provide one technique to input source documents to the reader.
Often input source documents such as those which have been scanned by a scanner or text documents include headers and footers on each page or odd pages and so forth. When a reading machine synthesizes speech for such input source documents it will synthesize speech corresponding to the headers and footers. Thus, if a header and a footer exists on each page, the header and footer will be read each time it is encountered. Moreover, for headers and footers that contain page numbers, speech corresponding to the page numbers will be synthesized each time that the page number is encountered. For a user of a reading machine this could be annoying.